


keep me in your clouded mind

by hi_raeth



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, There is no plot, it's literally just ben all hopped up on cold meds babbling his heart out to rey, this is totally utterly and completely pointless fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-27 00:38:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15012896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hi_raeth/pseuds/hi_raeth
Summary: Flu season has claimed its latest victim: Rey’s roommate, Ben Solo. But it’s fine. She’ll get him dressed, bring him to the hospital, and everything will be okay. Things are totally under control.Except for the part where Ben has completely lost his verbal filter and keeps babbling about his feelings for her.





	keep me in your clouded mind

**Author's Note:**

> So I’ve been on a Parks & Rec binge while I’m stuck in bed with a cold, and I just so happened to watch the season 2 episode _Flu Season_. Between Leslie’s behavior in that episode and my own uncharacteristic weirdness while I’m sick, I started wondering: what if stoic, quiet Ben got sick and completely lost his filter?
> 
> Title taken from Of Monsters and Men's _We Sink_.

When Rey walks into her apartment only to be greeted by the muted sounds of the TV, she immediately knows something is wrong. It’s 3PM on a Thursday, which means her roommate should be at work and the apartment should be empty. Ben is nothing if not a creature of habit, after all, and in the past year of cohabitation she’s pretty much memorized his entire schedule.

Thursdays go like this: he wakes up at 5:30 and brews a pot of coffee before jumping into the shower; re-emerges fifteen minutes later to have breakfast while his hair air-dries ( _heat is damaging, Rey_ ); heads back to his room around 6 to get dressed for work; makes one final stop in the kitchen to pour the rest of the coffee into his thermos and then brew a fresh pot for her (even though she’s never once asked him to) because he knows she has an 8AM on Thursdays.

And then he leaves for work, stays there till 6PM, hits the gym on his way home, and gets back at 8PM.

But not today, evidently, because today Ben is camping out on the couch with the thickest blanket they own ( _hers_ , obviously) wrapped around him like a cocoon. Rey closes the front door behind her and pads cautiously into the living room. In their entire year of living together, she’s never once seen Ben take a day off from work, let alone to veg out in front of the TV.

“Why aren’t you at work?” she asks, moving on autopilot as she drops her keys into the dish on the end table and sets her bag down on the armchair; her attention is focused entirely on Ben, who’s snapped his eyes open at the sound of her voice and is now looking at her with an unsettling expression on his pale face.

“Rey!” he says almost happily, the first time she’s ever heard him call her name that way. His smile is a little too wide, his eyes are a little too bright… She reaches forward to press her hand against his forehead.

“Yup,” Rey sighs to herself as she takes note of his burning skin. “You’re definitely sick.”

Ben seems completely unconcerned by this, choosing instead to nudge at her hand with his nose and nuzzle into her palm like an overgrown cat. Then, as if this uncharacteristic move isn’t disturbing enough, he starts to whine about how his eyes are burning and his throat is on fire and every part of him hurts. “I’m _dying_ , Rey,” he tells her, all wide eyes and trembling lips.

She should be recording this for blackmail material. Instead she rolls her eyes and moves to prop him up. “Ugh, why are men such babies when they get sick,” Rey mutters as she shoves at Ben until he sits up.

“You should be my baby,” Ben tells her very seriously, his eyes completely glazed over with fever. “And I’ll be yours. And then someday we’ll have real babies together,” he sighs almost wistfully, shooting her that wide, dopey smile again before he leans forward to press his face into her stomach.

Even in the throes of what she suspects to be a horrible flu, Ben’s hair still looks really, really nice. Rey wants nothing more than to reach down and run her hands through it while he nuzzles into her stomach.

“Okay, let’s get you to the hospital,” she says instead, stepping away from him. Ben nearly tips over when he tries to chase after her, and in his haste to regain his balance the blanket slips down to reveal his bare shoulders.

Rey squeezes her eyes shut and brings a hand up to rub at her temples. “Ben, _please_ tell me you’re dressed.” She opens her eyes only to find him shrugging the blanket off entirely, and of course he’s wearing nothing but the boxers he presumably woke up in this morning.

(She hates that she knows what he wears to sleep, hates how her heart skips a beat sometimes when he pads out of his room in the mornings still half-asleep and barely dressed).

“Nope!” Ben tells her with a boyish grin, the kind she’s only seen in the childhood pictures Poe likes to show her when he’s not around.

The kind she dreams of sometimes.

“Okay, new plan,” Rey announces as she marches over to his room. “Let’s get you dressed, and then we’ll take you to the hospital.”

Ben makes no move to follow her, and so she carefully makes her way into the room she hasn’t entered since Finn moved out and Ben moved in as her replacement roommate. The furniture is still the same, but it’s amazing how different the room is these days. When Finn lived here it was warm and welcoming and possibly Rey’s second-favorite place in the world; now it’s stripped down and clinically organized and there’s not even a single picture or knickknack on display. It takes a bit of digging around, but finally Rey finds a soft tee shirt and a pair of sweatpants nestled between his many crisp shirts and fancy suits and overpriced jeans.

Getting the shirt on is easy enough, even though she inadvertently gets an eyeful of Ben’s abs as she helps him into the tee. It’s not the first time she’s seen them – the man has an infuriating habit of walking around in just his boxers or a towel – but she’s never been this close and fuck, _how_ is Ben this ripped anyway?

His pants prove to be more of a challenge, especially because Ben seems to be more interested in babbling at her rather than actually helping her. She gets the pants up to his knees before motioning for him to stand, and Ben braces his hands on her shoulders for unnecessary support as she pulls his sweatpants the rest of the way up.

“You’re so good to me, Rey. You always care, even when you’re angry or you say you hate me or you call me an asshole. God, I love you.”

She freezes, her hands still curled around the waistband of his pants.

“Ben–”

Rey can’t speak, can’t move, can’t even look up at him. A year of fleeting glances and morning coffees and movie nights, a year and a half of wondering _what if_ , and now he just…

“Can’t let you know, though,” Ben mumbles, oblivious to the fact that he’s just turned her world upside down. One hand leaves her shoulder to play with a lock of her hair, and he keeps speaking as Rey’s heart gets lodged somewhere in her throat. “Wish I could just tell you, but then you’d just hate me even more and things would get awkward and I’d have to move out, and we probably wouldn’t ever speak again because you don’t even think of me as a friend.”

Why would Ben think that? After a year of her leaving leftovers for him on nights when he’s working late, after all those times they’ve ended up falling asleep together in front of the TV and sitting way too close to each other at Poe’s get-togethers…

Rey straightens up, but not before she gets a good look at the coffee table and the half-empty foil packet of pills on it. Great, so Ben’s sleep deprived (he always is), his brain is fever-addled, _and_ he’s all messed up thanks to flu meds.

At least that explains all of this.

“Come on,” she picks up the discarded blanket and folds it over one arm; they’re probably in for a considerable wait at the hospital since it’s peak flu season, and she doesn’t want him getting cold. “Let’s get you to a doctor.”

 

* * *

 

So here’s the awful truth Rey has never told anyone, not even Finn: she’d been attracted to Ben the second their eyes met the night Poe introduced them at his birthday party.

They smiled at each other, shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, and then ten minutes later they were somehow snapping at each other and glaring and storming off in opposite directions, and whatever else they could’ve been died that very instant.

Six months later Finn and Poe made the spontaneous decision to move in together, and unleashed all of their dirtiest tactics on Rey: puppy eyes and the repetitive needling whine of _but it’s true love, Rey_ , amongst other things. She has no idea what they said to get Ben to agree to this madness (she doubts any of that would’ve worked on him) but agree he did, and just two weeks later Finn moved in with the love of his life and Rey became roommates with the closest thing she had to a nemesis.

The first month had been bad (bad enough that Rey had seriously considered looking for a new roommate on fucking _Craigslist_ ), but then they just… ran out of steam. Constant anger, Rey quickly discovered, required  _a lot_ of energy - the kind that no grad student could spare. Ben - overworked and stressed out as always - felt much the same way, and so things changed.

First there was peaceful-yet-tense cohabitation, silent glares and curt nods but not much else. Then Ben started leaving coffee for her whenever she had an 8AM and she’d make sure to stash away some leftovers on nights when he was working through dinner, and sometimes on sleepless nights they’d watch dumb infomercials together and laugh so hard they’d collapse into each other.

Somewhere between all of that, Rey was reminded of just how into Ben she still was.

And then somewhere between him always letting her have the last slice of pizza because he _knows_ how she is about food ( _it’s all yours, scavenger_ ) and him reaching out to stop her from tugging uncomfortably at her outfit whenever she has to dress up _(stop that, you look beautiful)_ , Rey found herself falling in love with Ben.

But just because Ben was finally being a decent person didn’t mean he reciprocated her feelings, and Rey reminded herself of that every single day until she’d convinced herself that nothing could ever happen between them. Rey knew better than to be an idiot, knew better than anyone else the dangers of hoping for something impossible, something that would only end in disappointment and loneliness and heartache.

So she stopped hoping–

-until the day Ben, fever-dazed and drug-addled, said _god, I love you._

 

* * *

 

The next day is Friday, the longest day of her week, and it’s made all the worse by the fact that Ben isn’t there to slowly drag her into awareness with the sounds of him moving about the apartment, isn’t there to make sure there’s coffee waiting for her when she finally pulls herself out of bed.

By the time she gets home visiting hours are long over, and Poe tells her Ben’s still slightly out of it anyway. She resolves not to visit him until his mind is clear, until she can get an honest answer out of him.

On Sunday she volunteers to pick him up from the hospital and bring him home, tells Poe he’s done enough and she can handle it from here. She arrives at the hospital an hour before he’s set to be discharged, and feels equal measures of relief and dread when she notices he’s back to his normal, alert self.

The second Ben looks up to find her pensive face, he groans out loud and drags a hand down his face. “I said something stupid, didn’t I?”

“It’s only stupid if you didn’t mean it,” Rey shrugs, a deceptively composed act that’s completely at odds with the nerves that are eating her alive on the inside. She settles into the chair by his bed (dragged there by Poe, most likely) and hands him his favorite smoothie. “Got you something.”

“You’re the best,” Ben smiles at her – a barely-there curl of his lips, nothing like the boyish grins and loopy smiles from before – and immediately reaches for the straw in her other hand. “All Poe got me was watered-down soup.”

Rey stares out of the window while he drinks – it overlooks the parking lot, nothing special, but at this height you can pretend there’s nothing but the open sky so long as you don’t look down, can remain suspended in the middle of something so long as you don’t remind yourself of how far you have to fall, how much it’ll hurt when you crash.

She remains lost in thought until Ben lays a hesitant hand on her arm. “How bad was it?”

“What?” She turns to him, her eyes flitting to the point where they touch before she seeks out Ben’s worried eyes.

“Whatever it is I said, Rey,” he reminds her. “I can tell it’s bothering you.”

It’s sweet that he knows her so well, that they’ve started to care for each other. Maybe she should just keep her mouth shut. Maybe it’s better to just remain suspended in mid-air rather than risk a crash landing, to never know for sure rather than lose him for good.

Maybe Ben had the right idea, when he said he was better off never telling her instead of losing her. But the fact that he said that in the first place, coupled with the way he’s looking at her…

Rey can’t spend the rest of her life hoping.

So she averts her eyes, picks up the paper wrapper his straw came in and starts ripping it to shreds as she tells him, very softly, “You said you love me.”

Ben’s hand slips off her arm; out of the corner of her eye she sees how it hangs limply over the side of his bed, how his entire frame grows still and tense.

By the time he finds his voice, she’s created a small mountain of shredded paper.

“Rey…” Ben says, and the trepidation she finds in his eyes when she looks up at him gives her the push she needs to take that final step, to let herself fall and trust she won’t crash to the ground.

“Did you mean it?”

Ben stares at her, searching her eyes for the same thing she knows she wants to see in his. “Does it matter?” he asks quietly.

Rey goes back to her little mountain. “You said some other things, too,” she tells him, eyes firmly planted on the decimated wrapper. “You said you want us to have kids together someday.”

“Oh _fuck_ ,” Ben hisses to himself, barely audible if not for the fact that her every sense is attuned to him, made hyper-sensitive by his proximity.

“You can’t just–” Rey tugs a little too aggressively at an already tiny square of paper, and huffs when it flies out of her hands. “You can’t just say something like that and not-” She can feel tears threatening to pool in her eyes. Why is he so stubborn, why is he such a stupid _asshole,_ why can’t he just meet her in the middle and – “God, of course it fucking _matters,_ Ben! You keep making me coffee even though I never asked you to, and you sit through all of my dumb favorite shows just because, and you walk around as if you don’t own a shirt – for fuck’s sake, who walks around shirtless in _winter_ –, and I’ve spent the last six months trying to figure out what the hell is going on so yes, yes it fucking matters, just tell me–”

Ben takes her fidgeting hands in his own and holds them still. “I do,” he says, effectively rendering her speechless.

Rey stares at him, her vision swimming and her chest heaving and her heart racing.

He smiles at her – not the usual, not boyish, just that soft, secret smile she sometimes catches on him when their eyes meet in the middle of a crowded room. “I do love you.”

“You do?” she breathes, suddenly unsure now that this is finally happening. Now seems like a good time to pinch herself, but her hands are still trapped in Ben’s, Ben who is smiling at her and holding her hands and shaking his head in fond exasperation.

“So fucking much, Rey, _god_ , you have no idea-”

She nearly knocks over his half-finished smoothie in her haste to kiss him, and Ben finally lets go of her hands so that she can loop them around his neck while he pulls her closer by her waist.

“Okay, good,” Rey smiles against his lips, curls her fingers into his hair. “Because I love you too.”

“Yeah?” Ben smiles at her again – all bright and boyish – and this time she knows it’s not the fever, knows it’s entirely her. It makes his smile so much more beautiful.

“Yeah,” she assures him before she leans back in to kiss the smile off his face. The bed is too small for two and Ben already counts as one and a half, probably, so when they finally part she drags the chair closer to him and they settle for holding hands in silence while she rests her head on his shoulder. Every now and then they catch each other’s eye and smile for no reason, and Ben keeps pressing kisses to her forehead or her hand or her lips just because he can now.

“How long?” Rey hears herself asking a while later, and somehow Ben immediately knows what she's talking about.

“Honestly? Since the day I met you.”

All that wasted time. “If you hadn’t been such an ass,” Rey lifts her head off his shoulder to scowl at him, “this could’ve happened a whole lot sooner.”

“Really now?” Ben asks, his lips curving into an infuriatingly smug smirk.

“I was ready to jump you that very night,” she admits easily. “But then you opened your stupid mouth.”

Ben chuckles, leans in and softly bumps his nose against hers. “You love my stupid mouth,” he retorts lightly. “You love my stupid everything.”

“Yeah,” Rey sighs and kisses him, feels a matching smile moving against her lips. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> How is it that I’m more productive when I’m sick than I have been this entire month? Who knows. It’s one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, probably.
> 
> I’m hoping to write at least one more piece before the month is up, but if I don’t get around to that then I’ll see you guys in July for the second Reylo Week. In the meantime: I hope you guys enjoyed this! As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out/comment/etc. Thanks for reading!


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